On how this team has changed from in the past, Dan Girardi, who has been a Ranger since 2006, said at Newsday, “We’re more resilient, nothing gets to us, we don’t let a goal really bother us and coming back for wins and holding on to leads in the third, that’s what separates us.”

On MSG last night, John Tortorella said, “the biggest thing is our consistency, I think that is where we have really grown. We are not getting into too many valleys. The one in March was about the only one that we had all year. Our guys come into work every day and try to be the best that they can be.”

Tortorella talked about some of the goals this team set out for early in the season and how they accomplished them: “We wanted to try and get away from being that 7th, 8th and 9th team and try to get into the middle of it here. We kept on pushing, we kept on working on our game each day and you find yourself in the situation where we are being chased since December. It’s been a great experience for our team in a regular season situation to be chased the way we have been for so long and to handle themselves the proper way, especially in the month of March where we went through some dips. We just stayed about our business. I think that it’s something that they can rely on, lean on if they get into these types of situations.”

This is the process that John Tortorella has talked about. We have seen the Rangers, with mostly the same guys over the last three years, play a certain way and incrementally get better and put themselves in the position they are in now. By no means are they finished growing, but you can look back at the kind of stuff that John Tortorella would say last year or the year before and seeing it come to fruition.